


Havoc Dispersal

by maelidify



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rated for language mainly, alcohol tw, demon's first hangover, eleanor has an apartment in this because?? is she really still in a hotel room?, goodness I want to use that tag again in a story that actually deserves it, michael is a tender sadist, out of order events but they're numbered, slight dubcon warning because of drunk kissing, slight hint of eleanor/tahani, somewhere between 3x04 and 3x05 I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 07:58:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16425488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: “This might be a spectacularly bad idea,” she says, “but we should make out.”





	Havoc Dispersal

**Author's Note:**

> Quick note: There is some not-sober kissing activity in this fic, which makes it approach the realm of dubcon. Be careful if that kind of thing triggers you, and be sure to not actually do that IRL.
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**_Five_ **

Eleanor is used to Saturday mornings being two things:  
  
-Sharp (because if you’ve been drinking the night before, morning tends to slice you in half like a piece of particularly tender sushi) and  
-Shitty (because you realize that drinking doesn’t benefit you in the long run and often there is a random dude in bed with you and there is maybe vomit on your cute weekend heels).  
  
It is a sharp and shitty morning—well, it should be a sharp and shitty morning—and there is a man next to Eleanor in bed, and she is not surprised.  
  
It’s different, though, in the way a lot of things have been different this past year. She only feels slightly hungover, and there are no signs of vomit anywhere, and they are both fully (if messily) clothed.  
  
“Did we…?” he asks, voice pointedly drifting off. He looks endearingly bashful, kind of sprawled on top of her bedspread, disjointed. As though he didn’t know what to do with his long legs all night, even in (drunken) sleep.   
  
“No, dumbass,” she says, and the word tastes refreshing in her mouth for reasons she cannot place. “Don’t you remember?”  
  
“I have to admit, my memory is a little fuzzy.” He draws his knees up to his chest, scratches an ear. The morning sun creeps through the window, knifelike, cutting his old, sharp face in half. “I don’t like this.”  
  
“Don’t like what?” she asks innocently.  
  
“Not being able to fully remember—” And his words, of course, break off at the look she’s giving him. She can’t remember even the first time they met, let alone most of their background. “It wasn’t strictly my fault this last time,” he grumbles. “It was the only way to give you four another chance.”  
  
“One time out of, like, five hundred—”  
  
“Eight hundred and two, actually—”  
  
“—doesn’t let you off the hook.” She blinks, pulling the covers up a little more. “Wow, that’s _worse_. Why not just lie to us? We can’t remember anyway.”  
  
He has the decency to look a little ashamed at first, but a grin creeps onto his expression. “It used to be so easy,” he muses. “Things would go wrong and I’d just snap my fingers.”  
  
“Quite the power trip, huh?” Eleanor says the words sourly, playing with the frayed tag on her blanket. She is still under the covers and she doesn’t know why. Her tight blue dress is still firmly attached to her body, and he’d felt quite a bit of her the night before anyway. The memories were a little hazy, but at least they were there: his kiss harder than she’d expected, but somehow more careful, deliberate. A set experience, something that was real and almost made sense, as opposed to everything else. “Wish I could do that,” she grumbles. “Just change everything.” She snaps her fingers.  
  
“You’re doing it wrong,” he says. “Your wrist has to be bent like this.” And he envelops her right wrist in two long fingers, changing the angle just slightly.  
  
“I’ll remember that,” she says, “if I ever become a soul-sucking demon.” His fingers are warm, dry, and they hover on her wrist, on the place where her pulse is making an ass of itself.  
  
He sighs, disappointed. “Eleanor, no one _sucks_ souls. We _chew_ them.” He presses down on the skin slightly, his nail softly scraping her pulse.

****

**_Three_ **

The bar is stuffy and dark, and old people wearing surf shorts are everywhere. It’s an odd place for Eleanor to be on a Friday night, the music too soft and jazzy for her taste and the atmosphere too evocative of a dark, stretchy cloud of chewing tobacco, but Chidi likes it. And if they’re going to celebrate a week of remaining sane in spite of the knowledge of their mutual damnation, it’s best to do it together.  
  
Still, though.  
  
“Hey,” Eleanor says to Michael and Janet, who are standing behind her, unsure of what to do with themselves (Tahani and Jason are already ordering drinks; Chidi is discussing a book animatedly with the bartender), “is there a special circle of hell reserved for people who wear surf shorts?”  
  
“It’s more a square,” Janet says immediately, “and it only applies if the shorts are worn in specific scenarios.”  
  
“Funerals,” Michael offers, “or senior prom.”  
  
“Huh,” Eleanor says, processing this with a grin. Michael meets her eye and they share a small laugh over the condemnation of people whose fashion choices she doesn’t agree with. Then they both stop, as though in silent agreement about what this says about their quality of empathy.  
  
(She doesn’t know him very well, in spite of their apparent three-hundred-year history as torturer and tortured, as enemies, as friends, but sometimes she catches his glance and it’s a shock. It’s dark, a funhouse mirror.)  
  
Jason walks over with a drink and tries to hand it to Janet, who politely declines because of something to do with magnets. Eleanor isn’t really listening, because of the broken pay phone feeling. This is all a little much; there are too many things that don’t fit the definition of life as she’s always wanted it to be (easy).  
  
“Can you tell me something?” she says, not turning around to address him. She knows he hears her, though, that he’s listening carefully. She hasn’t quite gauged their relationship. It definitely doesn’t seem paternal, or fraternal, but he also doesn’t seem like he’s tried to get in her pants or anything.  
  
“Of course,” he says. “Anything.”  
  
“Did this shit make more sense there?”  
  
He considers this; from the corner of her eye, she sees half a smile on his face, and yes, that’s where she is. That’s where they’re the same.  
  
“It was never meant to,” he says.  

  
**_Six_**

They finally emerge from bed, and when Eleanor pulls the curtain back, Michael makes a shocked yelp, sounding remarkably like a cat doused in water.  
  
She laughs outright. “Wow, you’re fun hungover. I’ll have to remember this.”  
  
“The light,” he says miserably, “make it stop.”  
  
“Baby.” She lets the curtain drop again; she isn’t that sadistic.  
  
His shoulders relax and he rummages around in the morning shadow, hands clasping around his suit jacket, which had been discarded at some point. She’d done the discarding. As he pulls it on she takes in the breadth of his shoulders, his long angles. She always had a thing for older guys if they were _just_ awkward enough. A little dapper, a little dark. A little unsure.  
  
She could have fun with this. “So you really don’t remember last night,” she says.  
  
“Eleanor, I’m not used to drinking. Well, I’m used to drinking the fermented hope of damned souls, but that has a _much_ different effect on the body, and what’s with this lousy body, anyway? Do you know how many fragile little brain cells I lost last night?”  
  
“I won’t answer that.”  
  
“It doesn’t make sense that humans do this to themselves willingly.” He winces, perhaps at the sound of his own voice, and sits back down on the bed.  
  
“So,” she says, sitting next to him, “you don’t remember…” She rummages through the options she’d normally use in this kind of scenario: _That your wife called? That you promised to pay my college tuition?_ (She’d actually used that one successfully, though she definitely wasn’t in college at the time.) _That you danced naked in the bar and I took a video and if you want me to delete it you have to give me two hundred dollars and also take my word for all of this_?  
  
“I know what you’re doing,” he grumbles.  
  
“Shut up, I’m thinking.” She grins. “So you don’t remember professing your undying love to me?”  
  
He looks almost startled for a moment, a shadow passing over his face, but then he sighs. “I’ve read your file. I know about the time with the fake college tuition.”  
  
“So? You still could have professed your love to me. I’m highly loveable.”  
  
He lets out a dubious huff of air but something in his eyes softens and it makes her oddly uncomfortable. He looks away and reaches over to the bedside table where his glasses rest, sprawled lopsided over her copy of _Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals_.  
  
“Do you even need those?” she asked casually. “Or did the glasses just come with the person costume?”  
  
“Both,” he says. “We’re assigned inherently flawed bodies so we understand what their weaknesses are. I actually insisted on poor eyesight, it really solidified the experience for me.”  
  
“Ah. I bet you led the steal-all-the-nerds’-glasses game in Hell.” She doesn’t know why she’s joking about all this; maybe there’s some still hard, strange part of her that copes through indifference.  
  
He’s squinting at his glasses, putting them on and taking them off rapidly. “I think my eyesight’s getting worse,” he says, bewildered in an oddly childlike way. She considers this.  
  
“Maybe you’re just getting more human.”

****

**_Two_ **

Before heading to the lame nerd bar, she discusses it all with Chidi.  
  
“It all” meaning: her half-baked plan to just… make other people better so they could avoid the fate ascribed to them.  
  
“It all” also meaning the odd way the four of them had fallen in together, comfortably, drawn to something unnamable that existed in their group dynamic. And Michael and Janet fit into this dynamic, like the last two pieces of a bizarre cosmic puzzle, and she still doesn’t know how to feel about all of it.  
  
“I still feel bad about ruining Tahani’s cake,” she confesses to him, hanging out in his office while he graded papers. Tahani had mentioned it to her earlier that morning. “But, like, not _too_ bad.”  
  
“You could always order her another one,” he says, not looking up from his task. “Or even, might I suggest, bake one?”  
  
A rare sarcastic edge to his voice. He’s only half-serious. “Like I said, I don’t feel _too_ bad,” she says, and wonders how to verbalize what her worry is, what has been eating away at her when she isn’t looking. (An option: _So, uh, timelines. Weird, right_? But she doesn’t want to throw him into another nihilistic crisis.)    
  
“We’re doing good,” she says lamely, knowing the incorrect grammar will get under his skin just slightly. “I’m just still not totally used to… that. I feel itchy and weird.”  
  
“You’re better at it than you think you are.” He looks up at her sternly from over his dark frames. “Sometimes.”  
  
“Hey, I got you that lady friend of yours. You should think I’m a saint.”  
  
“What’s bothering you?” He has set aside his papers now. She has his full attention.  
  
“That there are pieces of me missing,” she says quickly, hoping that if she says it really fast it won’t get lost in translation from head to mouth. “Like we’re all that chick in _50 First Dates_ except it makes less sense and also forever is a really long time. I keep thinking I need a drink but then I start wondering about the impact of every decision I ever make, if I can cause someone to be a little less good, and if I think about all of this too long it feels like when there’s a broken pay phone in the middle of a field when you’ve just left your mom’s house and you want to call your boyfriend even though you just hooked up with a police officer when you got pulled over for running a stop sign and is this how you feel every day?”  
  
“Pretty much,” he says. “Minus the stuff about the police officer. And the stop sign, I never run stop signs.”  
  
“I _know_ ,” she says, exasperated.  


**_Seven_ **

“I’d make you, like, eggs or something,” she calls from the bathroom, where she wipes the remnants of last night’s makeup from her face, “but I’m a lazy bitch.”  
  
She can hear a bark of a laugh. “Have I mentioned that no one was allowed to swear in the Bad Place?” Michael responds, his voice an amused crinkle over the running water.  
  
“Uh, well _that’s_ truly hell,” she says, shuddering. “Your idea?”  
  
“Of course. I knew it would drive you crazy.” He’s in the doorway now, all angles and unsteady confidence, his suit as neat as it could be on the second day of wear.  
  
She doesn’t know where they stand after last night, but she knows enough to know it’s up to her. She can’t help it; it’s how she affects men and also women and probably, therefore, reformed demons as well. She looks him up and down, admittedly a little unsteady herself, and her hangover is a faint echo, a rapid heartbeat that feels very far away.  
  
“Do you regret it?” she asks.  
  
“The swear rule? Well, I still have fond memories of the eight hundred first times you tried to say ‘fuck’.” This is oddly in keeping with a recent line of their conversation, but she tries to ignore the pull of it, how it calls to the night before. (What was it he’d said before she suggested the kiss, his voice sharp and gentle all at once?)    
  
“No. I’m asking if you regret not _fucking_ last night.” She says it deliberately, trying to make him blush. She’s usually good at making older guys flustered, especially if they’re already felt her up. They know what they’re in for. They know what they can get again, or get more of, if they play by her rules.  
  
He steps closer, leans into her with a deliberate quirk of brow. “Now, that wouldn’t have been ethical.”  
  
When he retreats, she says, “and how long have you given a shit about ethics?” because she’s decided she’s going to swear around him as frequently as possible. Just a little friendly hypothetical payback on the behalf of that Eleanor she never was.

****

**_One_ **

It all starts with Friday morning, maybe, which feels like sand rapidly falling into more sand. The kind of morning that doesn’t understand its metaphors, and Eleanor allows herself an extra five or ten minutes of sleep before checking her phone. Tahini called, leaving a voice message, and there are also five texts from Jason, who of late does most of his thinking (the term, in this instance, being used very loosely) at four in the morning:

- _why was the book chidi gave me in a different language?_

_-remmebr tht kangaroo we saw yesterday? I think she is an alien_

_-do u think tahani will mind if I buy an inflatable chair on ebay_

_-how do u blow up a inflatable chair without your mouth hurting a lot_

_-that special agent angel lady is hot, do you think shell go out with me even tho im married?_

Still half asleep, she types: _were you holding the book upside down again?_ Then she plays the voicemail, which is a busy rush of background voices, and then Tahani’s elegant, clipped tone:  
  
“I know you value your sleep, but I am in distress and I _cannot_ eat both of these scones myself.”  
  
“Sweet, a brunch date,” Eleanor mutters, finally getting out of bed. She knows better, though— Tahani is still in the fallout from her breakup with that guy with the jawline and the no confidence.  
  
When she meets up with her hot snob of a friend, she realizes her hot snob of a friend looks uncertain, tired.  
  
“What’s wrong, mama?” Eleanor asks affably, stealing the slim pink mimosa Tahani has been drinking. She only looks mildly affronted.  
  
“It just occurred to me,” she says. “Were I to need to have a breakdown like Chidi had, I don’t know how I’d do it.”   
  
“I think you already did,” Eleanor says. “ _Wow_ , is this a grapefruit mimosa?”  
  
“Yes, and moreover, it’s _my_ grapefruit mimosa."  
  
“It’s weirdly good.” She takes another sip. “But anyway, wasn’t marrying Jason your crisis? Or that thing about giving away wads of cash on the street?”  
  
“Perhaps,” she says, a little stiffly. “And I’m doing what you suggested, that whole idea you had about _trying_ , but sometimes I wish I could be like you.”  
  
“Would you mind,” Eleanor says, moving in on the scones, “saying that again, but like, when my phone recorder is on?”  
  
“I wish I could just be petty. Like when you ruined my expensive cake.”  
  
“Babe. I’ll gladly teach you how to ruin desserts.”  
  
“Maybe I want to be different because I just can’t imagine it. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine hell.” Tahani’s expression is serious, almost tragic, but then she brightens up. “Shall we convince our fellow brunch-goers to leave their servers generous tips?”  
  
Eleanor nods, but there’s one certain thought in her mind: Hell, to her, is easily imagined. She wonders what that says about her. 

****

**_Eight_ **

Eleanor has been making her own hell since she was a small child. Since she was small and pathetic and kind of abandoned, at the negligent mercy of crappy parents, etc etc. Since she decided to stomp on everyone around her for her own amusement. She gets it and, moreover, she gets how to design it.  
  
She follows someone whose job _was literally that_ out of the bathroom and realizes that maybe her hangover is a little stronger than she suspected, because there’s something else burning under her skin, and maybe she likes having this weird dude here, picking apart his words and leaning about a person she never and always was. The uncertainty is still there, but as the morning unfolds, it almost feels right. Like a monster she’s supposed to wrangle for a while.  
  
“Eggs,” he says, changing their topic of conversation. Her kitchen area, adjacent to her sleeping area, is tiny, and he fills almost all of it. “Are they what you guys call ‘greasy hangover food’? Will they make my brain meat stop feeling like it’s about to fall out?”  
  
He looks ridiculous, gently lifting pots and pans out of the cupboard. What does he look like, she wonders, without the skin suit on? Does he have wings, horns, sharp teeth? Maybe he still wears a bow tie but it’s made out of fire or screams or something. “You didn’t answer my damn question,” she says, drawing out the _m_ in _damn_. “How long have you actually cared about trying to do the right thing?”    
  
He pauses, staring abstractly at the five pots laid out on the stove. How complicated does he think cooking breakfast is? “Compared to the thousands of years I’ve been around, a comparatively short amount of time. But suffice it to say: long enough. Now are you going to teach me how to cook this chicken period or not?”  
  
“You don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” she says, “do you.”  
  
He sputters as he looks down at her, slightly offended. A frying pan dangles from his hand and she reaches up on her tiptoes and removes it from his grasp. Then she leans into his chest and wonders if that’s a real heartbeat there, if he needs real blood to swirl through his veins and keep him grounded into the chaos of humanity.  
  
It doesn’t matter. He smells like sleep and, maybe, brimstone. Just a little.    
  
His hand rests on her hair, long fingers nearly encompassing her entire skull. “You always did know,” he says, almost gently, “how to read me.”

****

**_Four_ **

Three margaritas later—  
  
Eleanor has always been good at embracing chaos. She knows how to make herself a whirlwind, how to _demand_ , how to take and get lost in the taking. She’s cute while she does it, too.  
  
The bar is the wrong place for her because it makes too much sense. Sitting at the bar, she gets another drink, and turns to the man she knows is next to her.  
  
“Hey,” she says, “remember when you were my bartender?”  
  
“How could I forget?” he says. She swears he says _what the hell_ and puts up one finger, ordering a glass of something golden on the rocks.  
  
“You drink, my demoney friend?”  
  
“You should really stop calling me that. It’s kind of offensive.” He takes a sip and shudders, a small smile on his face. “I don’t usually drink human alcohol. It makes you all so stupid.” This is said gleefully, in the voice of a man about to embark on a particularly dangerous roller coaster.  
  
“It’s fun to watch,” she says. “When I’m not—“ she gestures at the glass in front of her— “I mean. I used to do that in high school, when I felt like dealing with people. Watch idiots get drink at parties, collect the social ammo.”  
  
“I know,” he says. “It was a clever system.” He finishes his drink. “Wow, this is _yummy_.”  
  
“Not usually what people say about whisky,” Eleanor notes. The margaritas are starting to feel heavy in her chest, and the words are clear, but just slightly slower.  
  
“It makes my stomach feel like it’s on fire,” he says gleefully, and orders another one. She watches him sip and notices, maybe for the first time, how he observes the world around him. Sometimes his gaze is calculating; sometimes it is curious.  
  
Something about him, a kind of innocence, strikes her as the perfect contrast to what he actually is.    
  
“I think I’d like your job,” she says, a little later on. She isn’t in the mood to socialize with her (human) friends and he’s walking her home, and she’s still trying to wrap her mind around all the weird shit that her life now is. “I’d be really good at making people miserable. I don’t want to be like that anymore, but I’d be good at it.”  
  
“You would be,” he says. “You certainly made me miserable, and I was supposed to do the torturing.” His tone is light, his words a little slower too.  
  
“Did you like torturing me?” she asks, and maybe it’s flirtatious, she can’t say. He laughs, and his face shifts, that fascination with the stupid whisky (like, really? She never got why people were so into whisky) turning back into that dark reflection. Maybe it’s the alcohol; his defenses are down and he is suddenly both a kind, dapper older guy and a vaguely cruel force. No wonder she understood him so well; she, too, knows how to be both charming and a knife.  
  
And to want to change all that while it’s still there, swimming around in the veins, or whatever it is he has that’s veinlike.    
  
“Sometimes? It was delightful,” he says. About what? Oh, torturing her. “You were delightful.”  
  
Should she be insulted? Probably, but she feels light, uncertain, okay with being uncertain. She unlocks her door and gestures inside with a tilt of her head. “This might be a spectacularly bad idea,” she says, “but we should make out.”  
  
“Make out?”  
  
“You know, smush faces, in a sexual way.”  
  
He shudders a little.  
  
“Wow, definitely never got _that_ reaction before.”  
  
He doesn’t say anything, but steps inside, looking uncertain and almost gangly in her doorway. “I don’t really understand kissing,” he says. “My kind does all that very differently.”  
  
She smirks. Were she sober, she’d probably ask him to elaborate. “I could teach you the basics, my demoney friend.”  
  
“I think I asked you not to call me that,” he says. He’s so tall and when he steps closer she reaches up, touches his face. He feels person-like enough.  
  
“Well, if I had to mash my food hole with someone else’s, I suppose I’d like it to be yours,” he says softly.  
  
“Stop turning me on,” she says, and kisses him. He kisses like a person, too; warm, dry, just a little bit of pressure. When she licks his lips he makes a startled noise and his hands find their way to her waist, pulling her close against him. When they part for air, he laughs.  
  
“That… I liked that.”  
  
“Damn right you did,” she says, leading him to the one chair in her kitchen area. He sits clumsily and she climbs into his lap, perhaps not very gracefully, and he initiates the kiss this time, licking her lips like she’d done before. Then he tugs her lip between his teeth, pulls, a twinge of pain that grows. She gasps a little.  
  
“I didn’t teach you that,” she says when he lets go.  
  
“I understand teeth better than mouths,” he says, as though that makes any sense.    
  
“Shut up. Do it again.”  
  
He does, sliding his hands down her back, thumbing the edge of her tight dress. His fingers are long, warm on the skin of her leg. She feels light and heavy at once, certain and uncertain, and he kisses her neck, softly bites her pulse.  
  
She slips his jacket from his shoulders and her legs are tight around his waist and she gasps at the pressure, at…  
  
“We should…” she says, and he slows the exploration of his hands.  
  
“Of course,” he says, and inhales slowly.  
  
“We’re drunk, or whatever,” she says. “So I guess not.” But he feels so _nice_ beneath her. Warm, solid, something desperate. Their eyes meet and she can’t stand the softness in them. It shouldn’t be there. “Come on,” she adds, climbing off of him, already missing the heat and hard angles of his body. She crawls into bed and he follows, staying above the covers. She turns away from him but she can feel him, just behind her, his weight on the bed, the steady uncertainty of his gaze.  
  
“Goodnight, Eleanor,” he says. She thinks, maybe, she is smiling.

 

 

 


End file.
